Rating: 
Summary: Will Money really save me time?
Review: Accounting programs, even if they are fully connected to your accounts, demand a lot of time manually entering, checking and correcting data. Before you use any accounting program, you should ask yourself: Is this program going to save me time, or cause a net loss of my time? In my experience, Money, Quicken and other programs have sucked me into doing a lot of work that did not pay for the time taken. If you are unemployed and have time to spare, or if you simply like accounting, then you are welcome to try keeping your checking account reconciled, or even maintaining a budget -- Money will support this. But as a busy, hard-working person, I would have been better off doing things the old way: just wait until the W2s etc. come in at the end of January, and add them up. The only thing you need to track and add up yourself is your charitable contributions -- unless you were unfortunate enough to incur more than 7.5% AGI of health care costs or 2% AGI of unreimbursed job expenses. Money has some arbitrary restrictions and unrealistic models.
1. It does not account for appreciating assets such as a house.
You have to fake this by manually adding "capital gains". But that is not really appropriate for homes. 2. Many people pay their loans thru ACH scheduled withdrawals from their checking accounts. But Money won't let you link scheduled loan data to your checking account, only to asset accounts. This is an arbitrary restriction. 3. If you are getting a paycheck sent to your bank, only the net pay is recorded; the taxes, insurance and other deductions from your gross pay are recorded nowhere. You still have to enter these manually yourself, if you want to do this. But where? There is no "escrow" account for funds that are sent directly from your employer to, say, the IRS. It puzzles me why Money doesn't seem to be set up for these ordinary practices of modern life. The only thing Money really does to save me time is this: it gathers my information from all electronically-available accounts into one place. This saves me from having to log into each account and adding them up. Of course, you have to trust the Microsoft Passport system to keep your data secure, but that's life in the 21st century.
Rating: 
Summary: Not perfect,, but still an excellent software
Review: I use this software to manage two saving, one checking, one money market, and four credit card accounts. So far Money 2003 does good job. For the financial institutions that Money supports, I setup direct statements and the statments are downloaded automatically. For smaller institutions like my tiny Federal Credit Union, I just export the statements and Money 2003 will receive it in just one second. Great! I also use Money 2003 to monitor my stocks. Views can be customized so it is very easy to see catagories like year-to-day returns and cost basis, etc. Broker statements are also downloaded automatically. Money also reminds me the upcoming bills and estimates the current year tax. There are more features that I have not explored (or won't need), but I am already pleased. However Money could not handle my IRA accounts (Vanguard). Vanguard only allows lum-sum download of all transactions, which users can not modify. Money could not make meaningful interpretions of those transactions so everything but the total balance was list incorrectly. But I don't consider this Money's fault. If institutions' files are more flexible, Money users can always make modifications. I used Money many years ago and I was not impressed at that time. Now internet certainly makes Money more pleasant to use.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product!
Review: This has been my first venture into the world of computer finance software and so far I am very favorably impressed. Microsoft Money 2003 is easy to use, is able to connect with every one of my financial institutions, and makes it simple to use only the features you are interested in and to ignore the rest. The menus are intuitive and the presentation is slick. I have encountered NO BUGS and everything has worked absolutely perfectly. This program might be useful for the person with so much money they can't keep track of it all, but I think this program is most useful to the person who lives paycheck to paycheck because after you enter in all of your salary information and recurring bills, you can forecast what your bank account balance will be every day for say the next 90 days and you can easily see what monthly car payments you can afford to make, or you can play around to see just how much more money you will have if only you stopped paying [X] a month for cable just to see Wolf Blitzer reporting, who really isn't all that interesting anyway, or how you would be able to afford that new computer you wanted next year if only you canceled that anoying call-waiting. Bottom line, if you like being able to see the big picture, and you hate call waiting, get this program, or at least download the free trial version and play around with it. It's that good!
Rating:
Summary: Finally can fire Intuit and Quicken as my Money Manager
Review: I have been using Quicken for many years and now Money has easily beat out Quicken. The conversion of my Quicken data was seamless and the Microsoft support was without question the greatest I have received from any vendor. Of course this is easy since Intuit's support has continued to go down hill with almost all support/question calls now billable for both their home and professional products. Money has added support for equity/index options something I have asked Intuit to do for 5 years without success. Lastly Microsoft's suite package continues to provide more value to the consumer while Intuit has eliminated their suite (including TurboTax) in order to obtain greater sales.
Rating:
Summary: Microsoft Money and your Pocket PC
Review: Microsoft Money is easy to use and if you bank with the right banks will download your statements, saves hours of inputing. As an added bonus on the Microsoft website you can download a free version for your pocket PC. This will synchronise with your desktop version. Makes keeping records less of a chore.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Money Tool
Review: I am a former Quicken user but switched to Money after Quicken 1999. Money by far takes full advantage of the internet than Quicken, bringing ones finance data up to date and providing extensive internet money tools and links to finance sites. The ease of balancing and updating one's finance accounts is great. Free electronic bill pay service is a bonus in this version. In addition to MSN billpay, Money will also allow you to use your bank's or some other bill pay service. Help is always only a click away at Microsoft's online support service personnel who have always been very responsive through emails or online chart. Get this product and begin your journey to financial control and independence.
Rating:
Summary: Big Brother likes to have you use their product their way
Review: I've had Money 2003 now for a few months, and it's been up and down. Some of the features like when you type in a payee and Money usually figures out the correct category-- example, type "In-N-Out Burger", and Money puts in "Food:Dining Out" as the category-- are nice, if not a little scary (how do it know?). But since installing it, I've had to rebuild my entire database from scratch. I was having dialogue boxes pop up all the time saying "That command is not allowed" when I wasn't trying to do anything but select a transaction to work with. I'd hit "OK" on a couple of dialogues, and it was fine until I selected another transaction. This was such an annoyance that I reinstalled Money, only to find out that it did the same thing with my backup file. So, I had to reconstruct my file. Bummer. The other major gripe that I have is the difficulty that I have in just doing basic things. Money has so many wizards and so many "user-friendly" (read: handholding) kinds of features, that I as a self-assessed poweruser find that I just can't do things very easily. I set up a loan, but I couldn't change the loan amount without deleting the loan and starting over. Sometimes the wizards are very helpful, but there is just a lot of stuff that Big Brother does for you. I hate that feeling. It's like that little wink that Clippy (the Office assistant) does when you close his window. Just go away! Don't wink at me just to get the last word! <end anti-Microsoft diatribe> I bought Money because it was onescore less two American samoleans at Costco after rebates. I didn't have any previous installs of any financial SW (even Quicken), so I thought Money would be pretty good. It's mostly been a frustration.
Rating: 
Summary: Quicken owners beware
Review: I bought the current 2003 version and previously the 2001 version in hopes of getting a new perspective. I have used Quicken since it's begining and was looking for a change. In neither version of microsoft could I convert my quicken files. In fact the 2003 version locks up my computer whenever I try to convert. I have followed the instructions and could get no help from Microsoft. I again resorted to upgrade my Quicken software and I'm giving up on MS Money forever. Twice bitten, etc.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product but Upgrade May Not Be Required
Review: For the past 5 years I have preferred Money over the competition. This year, the sixth, is no different. For the product itself, I give it five stars, but for M2003 upgrades from last year's M2002, I only give it three stars. There are no earth-shaking changes for me and there were no great error corrections in this version. I could easily live with M2002 for another year, but I do like to have the latest version when practical. If it is your first version, it is definitely worthwhile. The planner functions are great and, so far, the competition has gotten better but still not as good as M2003.
Rating:
Summary: 2001-2003
Review: First time i used MS MONEY was a couple years ago. I was hooked by the ease of it all in controlling finances. I especially love the what if scenerios to do with stocks and other omnious financial happenings. 2003 has made vast improvements!
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